Many applications can benefit from Shared Preferences - the Android platform's answer to the persistent storage of application settings. There are many ways to create user interfaces for collecting and displaying persistent settings for users. The easiest way is to use the PreferencesActivity, which provides a consistent look-and-feel with the rest of the platform, including the device system preferences. Learn how to use PreferencesActivity in this tutorial.

Our simple Mobiletuts tutorial feed reader application, which doesn't have an official name yet (we've been referring to it as TutList), needs better user control over the background updating process. Therefore, we'll add a single preference to help control the background updating.